Chapter Nine
Nanci Keller wanted to go out.
Annie hadn’t seen much of her friend lately—or any friends, really. Although she had grown up in Phoenix, she had left most of her childhood friends behind when she became a cop. Since then her friendships had mostly been sex partners, a few semi-serious boyfriends, and cop friends. The cop friends had, for the most part, vanished after the explosion, when no one could face her without remembering not only that she was deaf, but that she had lived while three other cops had died.
But Nanci’s discomfort had been fading as Annie’s hearing improved. She had called and said she wanted to go out and get wild, “like we used to.” Annie had some doubts about it—to Nanci, going out meant going to bars, where the background noise would be loud. Dr. Ganz had been right about that; no matter how much better her ears got, picking sounds out of loud backgrounds remained difficult. So they would go to bars, and Nanci would want to talk, and Annie wouldn’t be able to hear a thing she said. Annie would rather go out to dinner, but Nanci would consider a meal in a quiet restaurant some sort of heinous punishment. Besides, it was harder than ever to find quiet restaurants—most places in the metro area seemed to think decibel level was directly related to enjoyment of food.
Annie picked Nanci up at her little house in Glendale—she would be the designated driver, since she was still anxious about driving with impaired hearing and she didn’t intend to compound that by drinking. Anyway, she hadn’t been drinking much since the explosion. Her pain medicine kept her numb enough most of the time, and when she wasn’t numb it was because she was in proximity to someone whose mood overwhelmed hers. Mixing booze with it could turn a bad situation worse, and she wasn’t interested in winding up in the hospital again.
Annie parked on the street and walked up to Nanci’s pink, aluminum-sided ranch house. The yard was grass, mostly green but with brown patches. If it was skin, it would have itched. The pink paint was weather worn, more a memory of color than true color, and there were rust spots on it where the gutters and downspouts had corroded in the rain. People thought it never rained in Phoenix, but that wasn’t true—it just didn’t rain for months at a time, then in summer and winter it all came down at once.
Nanci opened the door before Annie knocked. She wore a glittery gold top that clung to her prominent curves, tight black pants, and black strappy heels, all of it augmented by multiple bracelets, necklaces, and droopy gold chain earrings. Early in her cop career she had complained about always pulling undercover hooker duty, until someone had pointed out that it was typecasting. She never complained again. For Nanci, it was a kind of validation that her success in a traditionally male occupation had not robbed her of her essential, sexually charged femininity. As if anything could.
Tonight she looked like she was going out to get laid, not to spend time with a girlfriend, but that was not at all unusual for Nanci. Or for Annie, for that matter—it had been kind of a specialty of theirs—but that was another thing Annie wasn’t ready for. Annie had chosen casual and conservative as her theme for the evening, wearing a bulky cable-knit sweater, jeans, and a denim jacket.
Nanci enveloped her in a jasmine-scented hug, squeezing until Annie flinched. “I’m sorry,” Nanci said. She knew to speak up. “Did I hurt you?”
“I still have to be careful about the collarbone,” Annie said. “Don’t want to re-fracture it.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“You ready?”
Nanci performed an ungainly pirouette. “Don’t I look ready?”
“You look ready for a lot of things.”
“Be prepared, that’s my motto.”
“You and the Boy Scouts.”
“Oooh, do you think we’ll run into them tonight? Maybe not Boy Scouts. But a bunch of broad-shouldered Eagle Scouts would do nicely.”
“Nanci, you’re thirty-six years old.”
“Cougars are the in thing,” Nanci said. “I may not be a MILF, but I can dream.” She reached inside, grabbed a purse and a light jacket, then came back out and locked her front door. “Haven’t you been reading the magazines during your recuperation?”
“Not a lot, no.” Mostly she had been reading novels, mysteries and thrillers, her usual genres of choice, but even more so since she’d been sidelined from the real-life action. She opened her Taurus and slid in behind the wheel, fearing the night would go downhill from here.
It did.
Annie’s every horrible expectation was met and exceeded. They hit three different bars, each one louder and more crowded than the last. Nanci drank and laughed and flirted, while Annie nursed club sodas and became increasingly isolated. The more she had to drink, the less solicitous Nanci became about Annie’s condition. At the last spot, The Library in Tempe, barely two blocks from where Morgan Julliard had picked up coffee for their meeting by the lake, Arizona State college girls in plaid microskirts and tiny white tops fetched the drinks, books lined the walls, and Nanci turned her attention almost entirely to a college man—professor, not student, but years her junior just the same.
There had been a time when Annie could have flirted professionally. She knew that glancing quickly at a man’s eyes, then looking away, then looking back again and holding his gaze, could say more than twenty minutes of conversation. She had mastered the art of drawing her arms slightly forward as she shrugged, squeezing her breasts together and bobbing them along with her shoulders. She could run a fingertip across the back of a man’s hand or around his arm and send a chill through his body.
All of it led to meaningless affairs—but then, that was the point. She wasn’t after meaning. She had enough of that in her professional life. She had closed a case in which a young couple had wrapped their colicky baby up in plastic bags and duct tape because his crying was interfering with their crack cocaine buzz. Upon realizing they’d killed the four-month-old, the girl had put him in a canvas bag and taken him to the Wendy’s where she worked, storing him in the walk-in freezer for a few days, until another employee wondered what was in the bag. Another case involved two teenagers who had kept their grandmother, the woman who had raised them, a virtual prisoner in her own home for more than three months, torturing her, loaning her out to friends for whatever purposes struck their fancies, and living off her Social Security and pension. A few cases like that were all it took to make Annie think that human connection wasn’t all that special—that people could be decent but could just as easily be scumbags, and the best way to get through life was not to rely on them for anything.
On this night, a few men tried to pay attention to her, even hit on her, but she had such a hard time distinguishing their conversation from the background noise that they gave up and moved on to women who could hear them. She felt little sparks of lust each time, but chose to ignore them, knowing they were second-hand. In her current mood, flirting just for the sake of flirting held no appeal, and neither did making the effort of moving from the wordless kind of flirting to the conversational.
By 10:30, Annie had had more than enough. She was tired of being ignored, tired of trying to smile and laugh, tired of the press of emotion, tired of straining to hear. Her muscles ached. Her soft, silent bed called to her.
Dragging Nanci out would be a struggle, but Annie needed air and silence. She tapped Nanci on the shoulder and pointed toward the restroom. Nanci gave her a quick nod, then turned back to her professor, whose hand, Annie noticed, was already resting on Nanci’s knee.
It was a dodge. Instead of forcing her way through the crowd to the restroom, Annie went outside. Sun Devil Stadium was just up the street, but she went the other way, out onto Mill, where there were shops and restaurants and a few people about. She passed a couple gazing into a store window full of T-shirts, and a pair of young women who had just emerged from a restaurant hand-in-hand, each holding leftovers wrapped in foil shaped like swans.
The quiet was a blessing after the raucous energy of the bar.
Halfway up the block, she saw a man coming her way with his hands jammed into the pockets of a frayed denim jacket. As he passed in and out of the colored lights glowing from shop windows, she could make out a fierce expression on his face, his lips clenched, his unshaven jaw as tight as a drumhead, his brow knotted. There was an angry, coiled tension in his step. He looked like trouble, like a human pressure cooker, a guy who needed a fight to blow out the steam gathered inside. He weaved this way and that across the sidewalk, and although Annie tried to get out of his way, his elbow bumped into her as he passed.
“Sorry,” she said.
He cranked his neck around, fixed her with a ferocious glare, but kept going.
In his wake, Annie was gripped by the impulse to grab him and snap his neck. She pictured the cracking sound, the rush of blood from his nose and mouth, the life fading from his eyes as death overtook him. Her hands shaped themselves into claws.
The impulse passed immediately. By the time he reached the corner, Annie recognized that it wasn’t her impulse at all, but his, transferred to her by his proximity, by their casual, glancing connection.
She had thought he was looking for a fight. But was it worse than that? Was he looking for a victim?
Her first thought was to catch up to him, question him, make sure he wasn’t fingering a weapon in one of those jacket pockets. But she wasn’t a cop anymore. She had no authority to do so, no badge to back her up.
Nanci, on the other hand, had a badge and gun in her purse. She was intoxicated, but she could probably pull it together long enough to shake the guy down a little.
Annie ran back into the bar, worked her way through the crush of bodies and the almost physical wave of noise, and reached Nanci. “Nanci, you’ve got to come outside.”
Nanci mumbled something. “What?” Annie said, cupping a hand to her ear.
Nanci gave her an exasperated look and repeated it with more volume. “Why do I have to go outside?”
“I’ll tell you out there,” Annie said, not wanting to shout it in the bar.
Nanci leaned into her professor friend, said something into his ear and backed it up with a kiss. Then she slipped off her stool and followed Annie into the quiet outside.
“What’s going on, Annie?”
Annie pointed toward the quickly receding figure of the tense man, who had turned right on Fifth and was headed toward the dark, empty stadium. “That guy just bumped into me.”
Nanci snorted a laugh and steadied herself with a hand on Annie’s shoulder. She was sexually aroused and annoyed by Annie’s interruption. “Did you get his number?”
“Nanci, when he ran into me, I wanted to kill him. I mean, really kill him. But that wasn’t me, it was him. He’s a time bomb, and I think he’s looking for a victim.”
“And I’m supposed to do what, exactly? Has he committed a crime? Done anything wrong that you know of?”
“Well, no … but what if he does?”
“I can’t bust a guy for having bad thoughts, Annie. You know that. I’m not doubting your, whatever, ability. But there’s nothing I can do.”
“Can’t you just stop him? See if he’s carrying a weapon? Get his name, in case something does happen?”
Nanci looked down the street. The guy was already gone, the sidewalk empty. She shrugged. “Thought crimes, Annie. Can’t prosecute thought crimes.”
Annie let out a sigh. “I know.” She couldn’t argue, but she couldn’t shake the vicious rage that had overcome her when the guy touched her. He had killed, or he would soon, or he would act out in some other violent way. She had no doubt of that. But Nanci was right. There was nothing they could do about it, short of putting him under perpetual surveillance, and even that would be a violation of his rights. The world was full of angry people, violent people. Some of them kept their rage in check for a lifetime. Others climbed into towers or stepped into schoolrooms or offices and opened up with automatic weapons. You couldn’t tell ahead of time—not even with supernatural help, apparently—which kind any given individual would turn out to be.
Could she spend the rest of her life fearing the most casual human contact? Avoiding strangers because of what she might sense about them? What kind of life would that be? Annie had been a cop, daughter of a cop and a suicide, never the most trusting person on the planet. But she hadn’t been actively afraid of strangers, and she didn’t want to become a person who was.
“We’ve got to go, Nanci,” she said. “I need to get home.”
“But … it’s early!”
“Not for me.”
“Annie, sweetie, come on. Have a drink with me. Just one.”
“No, Nanci.” Suborning a crime—the hallmark of the drinker. “I’m done.”
Nanci looked at her, then back at the bar. “I guess I can get a ride home,” she said.
“You sure?”
Nanci laughed again and gave Annie a quick squeeze. “Pretty sure,” she said. “Don’t worry about me.”
“You be careful, Nanci.”
“Always, girlfriend. Always.”
By the time Annie reached the corner, Nanci was back inside. On her way back to her professor, no doubt. Annie wished her well and headed back to her car.
The next morning, she made an appointment with Morgan Julliard.